7 Boeing-built 1200 1700 kg satellites that will be put in an circular 7825 km orbit. It's unclear if these will be 70° or 0° inclination. I don't think falcon 9 can do all 7 satellites with direct injection, so i assume they will be put in a elliptical transfer orbit.

edit: see coment from /u/Straumli_Blight below for tweet with more information, will definitely be several launches.

I mean, if the customer’s priority is speed/as few launches as possible, I’m sure SpaceX would rather win the contract and expend boosters if necessary. If the customer doesn’t mind paying more, so be it.

That's another good problem to look at. I think they could insert them into a transfer orbit with perigee at LEO and then the apogee at around the final orbit altitude (I think they're aiming for a similar 9000km orbit as the earlier generation). Then at apogee change the inclination to 0º but not change the perigee. That would still leave some performance to land the booster.

If they are 70˚ inclination, they would have to go from VAFB but I struggle to see them doing a RTLS. So unless they decide to send a droneship for one flight, they'll probably burn it to 'depletion' and allow it to get close to 7825km. If it's 0˚ inclination a downrange landing on a droneship would be a necessity due to the high ∆v requirements for going equatorial, and you'd be right that it would probably have to do a transfer orbit

The second generation satellites will introduce a second orbit of the same orbital height, but at an inclination of 70° for near-global coverage. The equatorial constellation will feature up to 24 satellites and the inclined orbit constellation up to 16.

Edit2: Seems this is still about the first generation sats, announced in 2017. So 7 sats at 0˚ inclination.

they would have to go from VAFB but I struggle to see them doing a RTLS.

Disposal at sea shouldn't be so bad, plenty of highly used F9 boosters by then and SES was never fussy about reuse. Also SpaceX will probably want to reduce their rocket stable as they prepare to transition to Starship. Going to need lots of space!

“Momentum in the O3b mPOWER ecosystem is accelerating quickly as we continue to build the right partnerships to bring this massively innovative communications system to market,” said Steve Collar, CEO of SES. “Working with SpaceX as our launch provider is fitting because in the last seven years we have already jointly made multiple revolutionary industry advancements that make access to space innovation more cost-efficient and unlock new opportunities in critical markets. We are delighted to have SpaceX as partners for our historic O3b mPOWER launch, and together, we will extend high-performance connectivity to all who have limited access to it today.”

“We are pleased that SES has once again selected Falcon 9 to launch their powerful, groundbreaking communications system,” said Gwynne Shotwell, President and Chief Operating Officer at SpaceX. “SES has been an important partner for SpaceX – fully supporting our efforts to make rocket reusability a reality. We are proud to play a part in SES bringing revolutionary connectivity solutions to the market.”

I’m not an expert on this, but I believe there will be 2 classes of ground stations.

Regular end-user terminals.

Store and forward, high-throughput ground stations that connect satellites to each other, and also to the internet backbone. These stations can also serve as portals to the backbone for city-sized ISPs.

Regular end-user terminals are cost prohibitive for the average user. The primary use case is for town/city sized ISP type applications anyway. mPower is what O3B is calling their managed end to end services. E.g. you want to connect back into your own private network instead of just getting dumped into gen-pop dirty internet wherever your connection is landing depending on what time of day it is.

Even though a significant portion is starlink, the amount of non starlink launches is still impressive. People were worried that we would notice a slow down in the coming years, but so far things still look pretty darn good. Let's hope it keeps up.

I wonder who Elon considers his arch rival to be? Is it Jeff bezos? Tory Bruno? Greg Wyler? Or maybe it's someone at GM or BMW. There's probably a number of people who think of Elon as their chief rival, but it's really hard to pin down who his might be.

I'd lean toward Bezos, but is bezos even a threat to him? They're so far behind spacex that unless they literally manage to leapfrog them in the next year or two it's hard to imagine them catching up any time soon.

I have this sneaky suspicion that Musk doesn't think of anyone as his arch rival. He thinks of them as people that need to do better, and the best way to force someone to do better is to shame them - often by beating them at they industry they are in. Whenever someone has said "we are coming for <insert Musk endeavor here> with our new product" he has tweeted "Do It!"

I think he would be overjoyed if someone were to catch up and provide REAL (and fair) competetion.

arian 5/6 manifest for 2021 is fairly full eh? Wouldn't it be nice if they had a few used rockets lying around they could use to fulfill customer requirements to space? Doesn't arian launch less than a dozen rockets a year? I think they will soon be selling mostly to the eu governments as customer leave for cheaper and quicker to launch companies.

That's a bit weird. The satellite purchase was announced in November, 2017. Normally SES and Boeing would have started talking to launch providers immediately. That should have given Arianespace plenty of time.

You cannot assume that the satellite will be directly over head. Also, unless they are switiching between satellites, if you wanted to talk to another person on that network, it would have to go ground (you)-satellite-ground-ground-satellite-ground (other person).

You cannot assume that the satellite will be directly over head. Also, unless they are switiching between satellites, if you wanted to talk to another person on that network, it would have to go ground (you)-satellite-ground-ground-satellite-ground (other person).

Greg Wyler originated the concept of a LEO/MEO constellation of satellites, to provide low latency internet to the “Other 3 Billion,” or O3B. The idea was originally aimed at turning the 3rd world into part of the first world almost instantly, by providing modern communications. Not only 3rd world citizens, but also the industrialized world would benefit, by opening up new markets, ushering in a new age of world wide peace and prosperity.

Wyler showed himself to be a world class thinker and dreamer, but I think he did not have the $100 million that Elon Musk had, to start the project himself, or the ruthless executive ability of Jeff Bezos, to collect venture capital and hold on to control.

My impression is that everyone with significant capital that he showed O3B to, said, “Great idea. We like it. We will build it,” but soon afterward they parted with Wyler, and built their own versions of his idea. The reason for the partings seemed to be, Wyler wanted to service the needy in the third world, and do just enough elsewhere to break even, while his backers saw the huge potential for profits and turned it around. They seemed to sat, “We will make tens of billions of dollars, and then we will fund the altruistic project in the third world out of a fraction of the profits.”

Wyler might be seen as one of the great visionaries of the 21st century, like Tesla or Otto Diesel in the 20th. But others seem destined to profit from his great idea.

I don't think bezos uses VC money. He literally just sells his Amazon stock bit by bit to fund blue origin. Elon uses lots of types of funding though, and has thus far managed to retain control of at least the vast majority of voting stock, even if he doesn't have a majority of the shares anymore. He might have a majority there too, I'm not sure.

Eh, I run VoIP over a private VSAT network, so about 560ms RTT. It's actually not bad at all. In all honesty it's not much worse than old school GSM phone (which had pretty significant coding delays in them).

This is a reason to downvote, I think. Assuming you mean AMOS-6, you don't hint at COPV, but at intentional RUD? That is ridiculous.

The potential of Starlink taking away business of the sat operators that are using SpaceX as launch provider is a valid, interesting question, but I'll first give you the opportunity to change the second part of your question.

Edit: Ok, it was 'humor'. Actually, it's more ignorance/stupidity, because when the satellite is on the rocket, customer and launch provider have the same interest, none of the parties wants an RUD.

With regard to Starlink, it's indeed possible that O3b and Starlink have an overlap in the market they are targeting. My 0.02$ is that without Starlink, SpaceX might win an even bigger share of the launch market. So while both SpaceX and SES might be helping their competitor, it apparently still is a good deal for both. Such things happen more often, look for example at ULA buying engines from BO, while BO might compete with them for defense launches.

While Starlink and SES both operate communication satellites they are different ‘classes’ of satellite. There won’t be much competition or market overlap between the two as SpaceX’s goal is to act more as an ISP for consumers while SES serves other telecom companies, cloud companies and government agency’s etc. However I’m sure SpaceX will take some market share from them when they get up and running with Starlink.

First of all, as others pointed out stating that AMOS-6 was intentionally destroyed by SpaceX is a serious claim without any merit. This can't be /s in any way.

Why work with SpaceX? Well, they can't do much else. SX is the cheapest and one of the most reliable launch providers, so if they want to cut costs they have to go with SX. And if they took the business elsewhere it would not substantially impact Starlink at this point (probably 1-2 years ago it would have helped, but now SX has demonstrated an advanced state of Stralink capability and those who should be in the know are). Investors would pony up the additional funds needed anyway. So it is best to optimize costs and look at the business plan to see how to co-exist with Starlink and other upcoming networks.

Why is this downvoted? I dont know either of these players and ive been in this sub years, since koreasat... the other day someone didnt knkw what 'norminal' was -- thought it was mispelled -- so i explained about insprucker's joke.